Play a Hand With the Masters Results and Panel Comments

[Toro]

I advocated pushing all-in on the River and as I said in one of my responding posts, I thought a lesser bet was a wasted bet and a mistake.

Judging by the length of time it took for the call, I think the combination of the extra 2000 and villian thinking "would this guy risk his whole tourney on a bluff" would have been just enough to make him fold.

[Jason Strasser (strassa2)]

Man.

I really think this could've been better.

Preflop is pretty boring. It has a huge effect on the hand, but there are obviously many different effective ways of not folding your hand, and no one would disagree. I frankly dont care about preflop except maybe what soss was having in terms of visual reads.

The flop is a very very interesting street. I think more interesting than the turn or the river. This hand was analyzed street by street, but the problem is that this hand is most interesting when you consider the entire picture of the hand, and not some street-by-street commentary. I really think with stacks like this I bet that flop more than I check it.

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Looking back and reading the comments, I think that I still check behind there following the rule of not cont betting when in position multihanded.

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To me this is something that separates the good ones from the poor ones, especially in a deep multi like this one. Here is why you bet the flop:

1) Because they will fold better hands.

2) Because people will call with hands like QT KT AT JT Q9 whatever.

3) Because people rarely bluff raise in multi-handed pots. Im willing to back down on this, but from what I know about Miami john he's not the type to CR here with pure air if you bet the flop.

So why would I list 2 as a reason to bet? Well, its because if you improve your hand you can extract a lot of value, and if you dont improve your hand you can just exit stage left. Its a perfect spot to look for in poker. Your opponent (if he holds QT or something on the flop) will probably willing to go check check check check to showdown, and he will also probably be willing to go check-call pot bet, check-call pot bet. You want your opponents to be in this defensive spot. You hit a jack or maybe even an ace, you can definitely extract some value but also dont have too big a hand where you can probably make a read and fold if you are behind.

Also, something never conisdered in this hand was the flop/turn combination. Damn right I'm suspicious. So you check behind on the flop and then make a nice raise on the turn. I feel like even selling KJ with that line is unbelievable because you are going to bet that flop more than you will check with KJ. I think selling a pair of queens is also unbelievable because you'd probably just call or raise smaller if you thought your opponent was drawing to a jack. The 'raise the turn' to get to showdown play borrowed from limit.

It's clearly the biggest problem with this hand. Once you check behind on the flop and then raise the turn, you are really going to have a hard time selling any good hand. And in those big buy in fields, people are generally not scared to go with their read and call you down. Your villain played very well. There are probably other ways you could've played this hand to get a different result.

-Jason

[Jason Strasser (strassa2)]

All this talk about betting 5k vs 7k on the river is just pointless IMO.

He calls 5k he calls 7k.

-Jason

[TomHimself]

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really understand sirio's smallish pf raise,

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Ok, tell me what do you think is the difference between 450 and 600, and how this affect your future plays in the hand?

[/ QUOTE ]I think there is a difference between 450 and 600, I think he will fold some of his weaker hands to 450 narrowing his range, I also was just noting that in the past 2 hands it seems your underbetting PF like in your example where one player limped in MP and you raised to 400 w/ KK, blinds at 75/150.

[Lloyd]

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Man.

I really think this could've been better.

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Feel free to send me your thoughts on how to improve via PM. Everyone was asked to submit an interesting hand. This was by far the best one and I don't recall getting anything from you , which I definitely would have liked.

[Jason Strasser (strassa2)]

Errr

The hand and format was fine and the hand itself was great.

I just dont like the street-by-street nature of the analysis of this hand. It's just not as interesting as it could be. None of these three good players considered what they were trying to represent, and instead said stuff like 'he has a weak ten so i bet'. I guess soss mentioned he wanted to rep KJ, but as I pointed out in the above post, probably the best way to do this was to bet the flop. Closing your eyes and pretending you have KJ is not as effective as taking a line KJ would normally make. I think even more importantly is that your opponent probably figured you for a straight or nothing type of hand, which allowed him to make the call with middle pair. If you bet the flop you will have a much easier time to represent many hands that are ahead of middle pair.

You need to be more conscious of the overall image/pattern you are giving off in a hand and paint the picture you want your opponent. By giving street by street anyalsis there is no opportunity for this.

-Jason

[fnurt]

To me, it was more about the discussion than the result. This exact hand is never going to come up anyway. But listening to good players debate back and forth, and hearing them describe the factors they took into account, now that was pure gold. It really doesn't matter what the "right" answer was as long as you learned something from the discussion.

Jason makes some good points about the drawbacks of the street-by-street approach, but judging by this hand, and the last one we looked at in this manner, it seems like you get MUCH better discussion taking it one street at a time. Otherwise everyone just kinda throws out thoughts at random and there's no real structure to the discussion. It's less helpful.

[Che]

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Feel free to send me your thoughts on how to improve via PM. Everyone was asked to submit an interesting hand. This was by far the best one and I don't recall getting anything from you , which I definitely would have liked.

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I don't think Jason is saying you should have picked a better hand, Lloyd. I think he is saying that the street-by-street presentation allowed for some out of context analysis of the hand, e.g. saying raise the turn was looked at in isolation rather than in the full context of having checked behind on the flop.

But I don't speak for Jason. [img]/images/graemlins/blush.gif[/img] I may be misinterpreting his point.

Given that we're trying to analyze these hands step-by-step, I don't think the presentation technique can be significantly altered, but we do need to police ourselves to make sure we are considering the entire picture (what we have *plus* how we got here), rather than just the immediate situation (TPTK, big draw, whatever).

Later,
Che

Edit: Oops, Jason already replied. He must type faster than I do. Actually, he probably just thinks faster than I do. [img]/images/graemlins/mad.gif[/img]

[Lloyd]

Excellent points. And when Exitonly said there was this big build up for what we had already discussed, I refrained from commenting because I knew more depth to this hand would come out once guys like you started to look at it in-depth. So thanks much and I hope to include you in one of our panels so you can help shape how we should be addressing these hands.

[sirio11]

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I guess soss mentioned he wanted to rep KJ, but as I pointed out in the above post, probably the best way to do this was to bet the flop

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I think it's pretty hard to represent KJ with your raise preflop, why do you think the chances of representing KJ are improved by beting a T93 flop?